Traditionally, role playing games are set in Medieval milieus. People immediately envision dragons, swords and sorcery, castles on high hills and monsters skulking about in the forest. But what if you change it up, and decide that your PC’s are engineers, sci-fi writers, dreamers exploring the future, exploring the limits of technology? That will give you a real flavor of the future. It may also increase the fun if you decide to use a rules base game instead.
I ran a game last year called Rogue Galaxy, set in the future. The game was fairly simple to play, but at the same time the feeling of mystery and adventure was truly there. So how do you keep things interesting? By giving your players a world to escape into. One where they can make their own adventures, work out their conflicts with friends and enemies, explore their own imaginations. It should never feel like the future is all around them, but rather part of their current reality.
The first thing you have to decide is whether or not you’re going to allow players to create characters from scratch. If you do, you’re going to want to run with it. Some people want to give the chance for player creativity to flourish. Others want to set pre-established races and skillsets, or evenrenewed skillsets as they become available throughout the game.
Usually though, most players want to get down to the component level, build everything out of miniature detail, and spend hours clicking through book after book, seeing what can be discovered hidden in each page, each die roll should represent a scene of adventure. It shouldn’t be a scene of forbid, it should contain things that can be discovered and explored.
The second thing you have to do is decide whether or not you’re going to allow the players to use random encounter tables. This can vary hugely, depending on how many players are in the game. Some games allow it, some don’t. If you have an extremely dedicated group that plays every game, they may never allow this to happen, seeing as they’re already doing everything right.
However, a game is going to rely on the random rolls in combat. So even if you have a perfectly scripted encounter, they may wind up being surprised by an encounter elsewhere in the campaign, so it’s good to at least give them that bit of leeway.
At the end of the day, these two things that are traditionally the carefully guarded secrets of the game are now the largely unacknowledged aspects of the game. Players may now come across Lycanguards,iddled with words and pictures, or Disquieted Spirits, or Gathan, or mutations of a character, or a map with an elaborate layout.
They may lose track of the rules as they’re playing, and have no concept of what an adventure even looks like. With wanderlust, players will likely be overcome with the idea that they’re running a game and completely losing track of the mechanics.
A lot of what players will now think of as advanced mechanics are actually simple, like using a die to determine an attack. A spell may require two rolls to cast, and you may need to roll to know whether or not you successfully cast the spell. Some campaigns have replaced random encounter tables with tracking discs.
This allows the game master to step back and give a general overview of the adventure
By presenting a tiered system, you give the players the option whether to bring one die for an attack, or two dice for a supernatural ability, or three dice for a typical combat stunt.
Wanderlust doesn’t stop at simply throwing in abilities and tactics. The penalties for incorrect rolls also become much more important in the campaign. If it is a combat encounter, the GM should allow minimal penalties for failure, so that the cleric who correctly rolls a low number still has a chance to cast a prayer or perform a defiling worship.
If it’s a quest, the character should still attempt to complete it as appropriate, using their initiative. minor penalties are allowed, but nothing should be greater than a -2 hit points penalty, which is realistic.
merit visibility the goal of this entry is to enhance the variety of abilities as much as possible. If there is only one template for abilities, it Lethium does not have enough diversity to cater to the range of play styles. It also doesn’t help that abilities have costs for use. Some abilities are easy to access, but few are inexpensive, and the opportunity cost never seems to be anything more than 1 point per use.
In contrast, nearly everything accessible in Neverwinter Nights has a cost, and that cost could be as little as 75$. A large number of abilities are accessible in multiple formations, but the costs are much smaller than abilities in other games. A consequently, cost should be much lower than 75$.
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